Online Launch of David Johnson’s Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa. Literature between Critique and Utopia

Assembles for the first time the many different texts imagining the
future after the end of apartheid

• Explores the history of how the future in South Africa after the end of apartheid was imagined
• Provides the first literary-cultural history of South African speculative fiction
• Studies the literary-political cultures of the five major traditions of South African anti-colonial/ anti-segregationist/ anti-apartheid thought

Focusing on well-known and obscure literary texts from the 1880s to the 1970s, as well as the many manifestos and programmes setting out visions of the future, this book charts the dreams of freedom of five major traditions of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance: the African National Congress, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, the Communist Party of South Africa, the Non-European Unity Movement and the Pan-Africanist Congress. More than an exercise in historical excavation, Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa raises challenging questions for the post-apartheid present.

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